Cloudbreak on track to humanize health care through innovation

LOS ANGELES –Telehealth provider Cloudbreak clocked 1 million minutes of services per month this year and was chosen to join the StartUp Health Academy for digital health entrepreneurs in September.

The company is building on that momentum by adding former Progyny executive Dan Shur as executive vice president of solutions and innovation to help further its mission of humanizing health care.

“Cloudbreak represents unified telemedicine,” said Jamey Edwards, CEO of Cloudbreak, during a recent edition of the Digital Health Today podcast. “We’re enabling health care systems to bring their full continuum of care around a patient.”

Cloudbreak provides a telehealth platform to more than 650 hospitals throughout the country.

Edwards said a big part of the company’s mission focuses on design thinking, a process that helps them create products to solve a problem based on understanding users.

“If people engage with the technology and it’s fun, they will use it,” he said.

To that end, Cloudbreak eliminated the use of awkward telemedicine carts and instead incorporated iPad touchscreen tablets into its system.

“That is a functional device that people are already familiar with,” Edwards said. “We were able to leverage the design thinking that Apple already went through and integrate it into our platform.”

Edwards said design thinking is outside of industry norms and CEOs are motivated more to make sure nothing goes wrong in their health system, than to innovate.

“They have to be willing to stick their neck out and say, ‘I think we can do better,’” he said.

Edwards believes that innovation in interoperability is what’s necessary to overcome health care’s challenges of siloed data, systems and departments.

“We’ll know our job is done when a patient owns their entire patient record and lends it to the institution treating them,” Edwards said. “We’ll know we have achieved our mission when patients and providers can collaborate around a care plan wherever the patient may be and whenever their care is required, regardless of the device or software platform.”